Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780393326307)

Marilyn Hacker's voice is unique in its intelligence, urbanity, its deployment of an elegiac humor, its weaving of literary sources into the fabric and vocabulary of ordinary life, its archaeology of memory. Desesperanto refines the themes of loss, exile, and return that have consistently informed her work. The title itself is a wordplay combining the Spanish word esperanto, signifying "hope," and the French desespoir, meaning "to lose heart." Des-esperanto, then, is a universal language of despair --despair of the possibility of a universal language. As always in Hacker's poetry, prosodic measure is a catalyst for profound feeling and accurate thought, and she employs it with a wit and brio that at once stem from and counteract despair. Guillaume Apollinaire, June Jordan, and Joseph Roth are among this book's tutelary spirits, to whom the poet pays homage as she confronts a new, dangerous century.

Author: Marilyn Hacker
ISBN-10: 0393326306
ISBN-13: 9780393326307
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 01/17/2005
Pages: 124
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.34h x 5.40w x 0.41d